


digging up old bones

by babypapaya



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Brocedes, Gen, M/M, Phone Calls & Telephones, Reconciliation, Rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:53:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23681143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babypapaya/pseuds/babypapaya
Summary: "You misshim," Valtteri prompts.A wave of guilt, even anger, burns through Lewis from his head to the toes of his well-worn Pumas. "We hated each other when he left. He didn't even tell me. I didn't even know where he moved to fortwo years."Lewis and Nico had lived hand in hand—when did that become a gesture of control rather than affection?
Relationships: Lewis Hamilton/Nico Rosberg
Comments: 15
Kudos: 72





	digging up old bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [singlemalter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlemalter/gifts), [Directionless_Foray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Directionless_Foray/gifts).



> for malter, who made me start this. for directionless_foray, who made me finish it.
> 
> beta'd by flamingosarepink.
> 
> inspired by tame impala - past life
> 
> keep it lowkey, keep it classy, keep it off twitter and out of real life and away from the drivers.

Valtteri’s phone doesn’t ring very often. To be fair, he usually doesn’t answer it when it does, he’s more of a texting kind of man. 

He has special ringtones for the people whose calls he does take. He’s in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher when his phone, dropped in the living room, goes off with _Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)._ Valtteri tosses his dish towel aside and leaves the kitchen. Lewis?

Maybe Lew’s going away for the week and needs someone to stop by his place. Maybe he wants someone to fetch the mail and park in the driveway, to make the place look lived-in. Maybe Lewis needs someone to walk his dogs.

Valtteri picks up the call. He loves those dogs.

* * *

The barstool screeches across the tile floor; Lewis perches on its edge, dropping his phone with a clatter on the kitchen island counter. He pushes an anxious finger down his contacts menu. “Valtteri, V… Bottas,” he mutters under his breath. Coco and Roscoe come to investigate, puppy toes clicking on the floor. 

“One sec,” he tells them instinctively, not looking up. Roscoe leaves and Lewis doesn’t notice, just hits the call symbol. It feels rude, calling without a text first, but Lewis doesn’t have the time to fight his trembling hands right now. 

Valtteri picks up faster than usual. “What’s up, Lew? Need me to cut the grass this weekend?”

Lewis drums restless fingers against the laminate countertop. “No, I… need a bit of help,” he manages to falter.

“Oh.” Valtteri’s tone changes, as if he’s suddenly sat up straight. “Um. Do you need me to come by?”

“No, no just—I need to talk. If you’ve got time,” he adds hastily.

“I have time,” Valtteri replies simply. 

“I saw him again, Val. I never thought I’d see him again.” Lewis’ mouth is dry. Neither of them need to clarify who _he_ is.

“Oh. _Where?”_

“I was just picking up some pieces from the dry cleaner’s, you know the one I go to, on Fischer and King—”

“Yeah, I dropped off a suit for you there once.”

“Yeah, I usually go every Thursday at lunch. So I was leaving, I was getting in my car, and I went to adjust the mirror, you know the parking there—”

“Parking on Fischer’s always tight,” Valtteri sympathises, nodding.

“God, it’s so annoying. So I don’t know why, but I looked for a second, and—I saw him in the reflection. His jacket. The same one—”

“The brown and blue one.”

“—that I found for him at the thrift shop in the west end. It was him, he turned the corner and I saw his hair and his face and—I don’t even know how I drove home, man. I’m still shaking. It was just for a second.” Lewis rubs his face. “This probably is a huge overreaction.” 

“No, don’t worry about that.” Valtteri is calm, somehow. “It’s been six years since he moved away, right?” 

Lewis half laughs, but it’s hollow. “Jeez, that was so stupid. Inane.” 

Coco scrabbles noisily at the rungs of the barstool as Lewis holds his breath, wondering what to say. He nudges the puppy away with his foot. “Just a minute, babe, daddy’s on the phone,” he hisses. Lewis brings the phone back to his ear. “It feels like a past life, man. Something I’ve buried, and he comes back as a ghost now.”

“A ghost is a long way from a star-crossed high school lover.”

“Well, somewhere between a lover and a friend. I think it was—a crush that went pear-shaped?”

An itchy, unsettling resentment, that settled in their friendship like an ache in the back of your head on a day when the sun is too bright. Lewis knows that Valtteri doesn’t know the details, none of their friends know the details. Lewis doesn’t even think he knows the details himself. 

“Could you take it back to before it went pear-shaped?” Valtteri asks drily. 

“It’s long shut down by this time, man.”

“You two were obsessed with each other.”

Lewis can picture Valtteri sprawled on his couch, rolling his eyes at the grubby ceiling of his apartment. Rolling his eyes because he knows and Lewis knows that this conversation may not be an argument, but there damn sure is going to be a winner.

“It was different back then, you can’t just patch the past into the future, you can’t Jay-Gatsby this for me.” Lewis chews his lip. “Since when were _you_ a romantic, anyway?”

“ _You_ called _me,_ mate.”

“We were so young, really, nothing’s that real when you’re young.” Lewis rubs his face. “But nothing’s that fun when you’re old." A pause.

“Why did you try to forget him?”

“I was moving on—”

Valtteri huffs. “You were switching off, mate.”

“Come on, it’s always like that when you’re getting over a—a crush, I guess.”

“That wasn’t a crush. A crush is what I felt about N– what I felt about him in ninth grade. You—”

“What?” Lewis laughs, momentarily distracted. _“You?”_

He can practically hear Valtteri grimacing over the line. 

“You weren’t the only one who thought he had a great ass,” Valtteri mutters through the side of his mouth. “You two were graduating. I only tagged along everywhere because Keke said he had to be nice to me, and because my other option for hanging out was Daniel, and, well. Daniel was horrifying in ninth grade.”

Lewis listens, almost incredulous. It feels as though he’s learning deep lore, nearly two decades later. “He never told me that.”

“He didn’t know. Obviously. He only ever looked at you.” 

“Wait, are you upset about that?” 

Valtteri snorts. “Are you serious? Only one of us has not gotten over him, and it’s not _me.”_

"Look, it’s—it’s about what it represented. Being young when everything is surreal. Sort of poetic. I miss the way it _felt,_ Nic– he kept everything from being so—banal."

"You miss _him,"_ Valtteri prompts.

A wave of guilt, even anger, burns through Lewis from his head to the toes of his well-worn Pumas. "We hated each other when he left. He didn't even tell me. I didn't even know where he moved to for _two years._ "

A silence, somehow incredulous, fills the phone line.

"Lew. He walked your dog and put himself down as a fake reference on your resumé. He dragged you to the clinic when your first tattoo got infected from that shitty ink shop, when _all the rest of us_ said you would be fine. He got bullied all through school—"

"God, I forgot that—"

"—and still got in fights for _you,_ and he would get absolutely flattened, and little, baby Valtteri would have to drag him home to Keke to get ice and band-aids."

Lewis barks out a laugh. "You? You must have been in kindergarten, man."

"I was." Valtteri decides his speech is over. 

"Alright, I miss him." Lewis knows how to say that.

He doesn't know how to say what went wrong. He has no words to catalogue the slide from childhood friendship to adolescent camaraderie which was so wrapped in mutual teenage infatuation, no explanation for the creeping rivalry that turned the ugly corner into paranoia, love and obsession and fear so tightly bound to each other. 

They lived hand in hand—when did that become a gesture of control rather than affection?

_I have to impress you. I have to trust you, make you trust me. I love you—_

—look _at me._

_You have to see me, see my soul but I don't know how to say it and you don't know how to hear it. You have to pay attention to me._

_I have to be good enough for you. I have to deserve good, deserve you. I have to be good enough good enough good isn't good I need better I'll be everything give you everything but I'll take everything—Nico—_

_I'm scared I disgust you and I love you and I'll be good enough for you if it's the last thing we do._

Lewis tastes blood in his mouth, and closes his eyes only to see Nico in the stillness. 

Nico felt like fingernails biting into his palms, hands clenched tight with determination. Like long glances across crowded rooms, gazes that met, full of anticipation until the connection held just too long and began to crackle. 

Nico felt like silent, guilty debates with his bedroom ceiling on sleepless nights: _how can you hate someone you love? how can you concede to someone who should stay at your shoulder? how can he piss me off_ so much? 

Loving Nico was the jolts of anxiety in his stomach sometimes when their eyes met, but Lewis had thought he couldn’t live without him. Loving Nico was the assurance of having a ride-or-die whom no one else compared to. Whom people were _envious_ of.

Lewis wasn't alone in that.

Loving Nico was sending bitter late-night texts of cryptic emotions that were too aching to say in person, because god forbid Lewis see his face crumple in confusion or hurt. It was easy to hit send and imagine his messages were read with as much passive anger as they were sent. 

Maybe it was sick, but Lewis would die if he never stabbed the toxic boil of self-induced envy.

Self-induced envy. 

_You both live in your heads all the damn time,_ Seb had complained once, when they were still in high school. Nico and Lewis had gently touched fingertips and grinned at each other. 

It was good, to pretend. To feign to everyone else that what they had was near telepathy. To tell _themselves_ that there weren't class-A-rated fire doors blocking off the more tentative selections of their thoughts. 

_Yeah, we live in our heads but I'm terrified of what I don't know is in his,_ Lewis would say to Seb, if he could do it all over again. 

God, he should have been able to read the writing on the wall. 

“Well, do you _want_ to?” The line crackles as Valtteri cuts Lewis’ long silence.

“Do I want to _what?”_ Lewis starts at the question and Coco shies away, puppy paws tapping the floor as she retreats to the doorway.

“Take it back to the way it was before. Before it went pear-shaped.”

“It was a whole past life ago before things went sour, Val. Maybe he’s still pissed off.”

“He sent me a Christmas card last year, you know.” 

“Oh yeah?”

“There was a photo print inside it too. You know the Christmas we all went upcountry for skiing.” A statement, not a question.

Images slowly come to focus in Lewis’ mind. There was a snowstorm that year, delaying their leave date until Christmas Eve, and they were _all_ there. Seb, Hulk, and Daniel, and even Checo, from high school, and a collection of their university friends. 

“You brought Marcus, right? And Robert was there. God, even JEV was there.”

“Yeah, and Daniel’s mum called and told us we had to do Christmas there.”

“And we didn’t have any gifts! Or proper food, just popcorn and that nasty box of candy canes Hulk brought.” Lewis tries to smile, but it’s a wince. The candy canes were truly terrible. “And Romain taught us how to do origami with toilet roll for gifts.”

“And I was the only one good at it,” Valtteri adds, faintly smug. “Anyway, I don’t know how he got it, but he sent me the photo Seb took.”

“What’s it of?” Lewis asks, curious but cautious. 

Valtteri almost laughs. “It’s the group shot. Daniel and Hulk are ostentatiously pretending to fuck under the mistletoe, and the rest of us are all cute with our shitty toilet paper cranes by the fire. Checo is burning his, I’m yelling at him because I made it for him, and you’re practically sitting in Nico’s lap. He’s feeding you a piece of popcorn. He’s very pink.”

Lewis’ silence is loaded.

“He wasn’t trying to get rid of the photo. He said to keep it because he has the original.” Valtteri takes a few breaths. “He wouldn’t send that or keep it if he hated you. I think he doesn't know _how_ to hate you."

"How could he not, when I hated _him?"_ Lewis despises the way he sounds almost plaintive.

"Did you?"

"Of course I did, man. That's _why_ he left, because I couldn't hide what I'd been repressing. For years."

"I would respectfully disagree."

Lewis holds his breath. Cranky, stubborn Val. Well, not cranky. Just needing lots of thinking space.

"You were just afraid of him."

Lewis exhales. Looks out the window. Squeezes his eyes shut as his world slowly begins to turn right side up.

It feels like a Jenga tower un-collapsing. Nico was so good at Jenga.

He opens his eyes again. "Somehow, I knew that." 

"But you didn't think it, I know."

"You know."

"I know everything."

“That’s why I called you, man.”

“Now call _him.”_

“Val, we’re practically strangers now.”

“He’s not a stranger if he’s always on your mind, mate. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I don’t even know if he has the same phone number,” Lewis offers, but there’s no punch left in the rebuttal.

Valtteri bites his lip to hold back a laugh. “Who knows? Maybe he does.”

* * *

_“Hello?”_

“Nico?”

_“Lew?”_

* * *

_I'll be good enough for you if it's the last thing we do._

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! any kudos and comments are appreciated <3


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